I’ve been sad and struggling lately. My inner struggles, for want of a better term, have to do with several items or topics, issues, affecting my life. They all swirl around in my head in a whirlpool eddy of thought and emotion, differing ones bobbing to the surface at various times, then being replaced by other thoughts on other topics of deep concern to me. Round and round they go. It can be daunting at times, having so many things to think through and process in a meaningful, healthy way, especially when I am feeling overwhelmed, overcome with helplessness and so many other feelings I haven’t yet been able to name.

Since I am an emotional person, my emotional outlet is tears; it’s just the way I’m made. And I’ve been “emotional” lately especially when I think of my mom. I weep, crying out my frustrations and anxious thoughts and doubts to the Lord. I have found it difficult to deal with what has taken place in mom’s life the past several months: Alzheimer’s and its ruthless advance, embolisms, hospitalizations, therapy, broken hip, hospitalization and surgery, therapy in another facility, dislocation of her hip, hospitalization. And now a long term care facility in which we foresee her staying the rest of her life because of her physical decline and the inability to care for her at home any longer. Though we are reassured by the good care and professionalism of her current care-givers in this new home, it is still a long way from what we would prefer for her. All the pain and suffering she has endured…this is hard to understand and accept, even though it Is; it exists as a reality hitting us in the face every day.

So I weep. By myself, but not alone. Thank God, all those years of seeking to follow the Lord and practice God’s Presence in my life, bumbling as it may be, and even before I knew to do that, He has been, and is, with me… and I know it. I am conscious of it even when I complain to Him that He seems silent and far away, that it doesn’t seem like He is with me; when I beat my fists of fear and doubt and rage against what seems a rock wall, implacable, and unmoving and unhearing.

In my quieter moments I find this rock wall to be the Rock of my shelter, the everlasting Rock of Protection, my safe place; the Rock Who is my loving heavenly Father, Who has His arms around me as I beat against His breast. This Rock wall is solid, but no, not implacable after all. This Rock is unmoving yet not unmoved by my tears and rantings; not unhearing but patiently listening. And as I wear myself out on Him, I find I am secure in His safe, protecting walls.

I can accept this Reality (of His Presence) or fight against it. I am committed to Jesus Christ and I choose to accept His Presence, even when it seems He is silent to my prayers. I recognize I am but flesh and he is Other. Where I do not understand the things that go on in life, He does. But I am made in His image, as we all are. I weep and rage because I love; does the God Who is Love also weep and rage?

Jesus did.

In this I am strangely comforted.

It is different being on the “other side” of sickness and physical suffering; to accept the grace available for witnessing the pain and suffering another must endure, rather than oneself. I have been able, over the 45+ years I have had MG, and now breast cancer, to experience the grace of God to accept whatever came my way, not without struggle and tears at times, of course, but always, always, the Presence of God and His cushioning grace was there for me, often without my thinking about it. It just was.

Now, in this new arena of struggle I can recognize familiar “shapes” in the dark. The “shape” of God’s Presence, the “shape” of his truths are the same as in past struggles I have endured…and triumphed in. God’s truths are Light; God is Light and He brings His Light to my darkness. What I have learned in past struggles I now must apply to the current struggles. I must keep going back to those familiar “shapes” in the darkness. They gradually lighten it.

I realized something this morning. My focus in these struggles of my heart, my mom’s situation being just one of them, has been on the issue, person, or problem at hand. There is the source of so much of my consternation and hopelessness. There is no deliverance except in One. So I confessed it to the Lord this morning. I raised my eyes to Jesus, the One, the only Deliverer, Who can bear what I am incapable of bearing (for He bore it already). He has shown me, shown us all, how to bear the unbearable. He lifted His eyes to His Father, seated in Heaven, looked beyond His immediate circumstances, the lifetime of struggle and the horror of what he was facing as He approached the cross, to the ultimate goal of it all (Hebrews 12). No struggle is wasted from God’s perspective. Even when we don’t understand why things happen as they do, God does and I will choose, right now, that He does know best and is working out His purposes through it all.

I’m still struggling in the dark. But it has gotten a little lighter.

Jacque